First Steps Toward Artificial Gravity

CompaniaHill writes "Have scientists been able to artificially generate a gravitational field? Researchers at the European Space Agency believe so. "Small acceleration sensors placed at different locations close to the spinning superconductor, which has to be accelerated for the effect to be noticeable, recorded an acceleration field outside the superconductor that appears to be produced by gravitomagnetism. This experiment is the gravitational analogue of Faraday's electromagnetic induction experiment in 1831." The effect is very small, so don't expect to see it used in spacecraft any time soon. But the effect is still many times larger than the predictions of Einstein's theories. "If confirmed, this would be a major breakthrough," says [Austrian researcher Martin] Tajmar. "It opens up a new means of investigating general relativity and it consequences in the quantum world.""

Comments

Forgot spaceships

[bigattichouse]

How about creating foam metals in a low gravity field?

Re:Forgot spaceships

[VIPERsssss]

All of those have been done:

antilight: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experimen t
antisound: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noise-cancelling_head phone
antiheat: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bose-Einstein_Condens ate (specifically "laser cooling")

Yevgeny Podkletnov

[volts]

This sounds like the work of Yevgeny Podkletnov He claimed to have countered the effects of gravity in an experiment at the Tampere University of Technology in Finland in 1992 using a spinning super conducting ceramic ring.

Re:Awesome

[bev_tech_rob]

You haven't been keeping up on your Trek manuals, have you? The Inertial Dampening System predicts the adjustments it has to make when the command to jump to warp is issued. With weapons impacts, those are not predicted. The system can only REACT, therefore you get the shaking and jolting...

Orginal Paper Here

[spiro_killglance]

Hi, i found the paper at the Los Almos pre-print archive.

http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0603033

Actually, i think i believe the experiment, but i don't
think i believe the interpretion, as the article and
the above paper state, this effect is 10^30 times stronger
than the gravitation force you'd expect from too small
chunks of matter. I think they've discovered a new force
all together.

Re:Orginal Paper Here

[SiliconEntity]

Thanks, that is a good reference and does answer some of the questions that have been posed here.

They measured accelerations with commercially available accelerometers. These were placed into steel boxes to act as Faraday cages and block EM radiation. They ran the experiment many times with non-superconductors and with the superconductors too warm to super-conduct, and found no effects.

There were no effects with high temperature superconductors, which their theory (a non-standard theory) predicted. There were also no effects when high-temp superconductors were lowered to liquid helium temperatures, which they also predicted.

The only effects they saw were with low-temp superconductors, niobium and lead. There were no effects above their superconducting temperatures.

They basically saw two effects. When accelerating a spinning superconducting ring, accelerometers located near a ring segment recorded an acceleration opposite to that experienced by the ring segment. So for example if this piece of the ring was spinning north, when they sped it up the accelerometers showed a southward force, and when they slowed it down the accelerometers showed a northward force.

The strongest reading was by an accelerometer inside the ring, but one located just above the ring was almost as strong. This was actually contrary to their (non-standard) theory, which predicted that the force should be mostly localized to the ring plane. But since their theory is completely blue-sky and non-standard, that perhaps doesn't mean too much.

The other effect they saw was with a constant spinning speed, lowering the temperature from non-superconducting to superconducting. As they passed through the critical temperature, the accelerometers again felt a force. It was noted that this force was in the opposite direction from the acceleration force, which I believe was also contrary to their (non-standard) theory.

They also briefly mentioned Podkletnov, but only to say their results were "very different" from his. They also said that they did not see any signs of the effects he reported, to the limits of their measurement. I would note that I think Podkletnov used a spinning disk while these guys used a spinning ring.

Overall it looks like a very careful experiment that did eliminate most sources of error. However the measured values were close to the noise limits of the accelerometers, which is always a little suspicious in science. The experiment definitely looks ready for replication. If it works it will turn gravitational theory on its head. There is no theory in existence that can account for these results. Not general relativity, not quantum gravity, and not even these guys' non-standard theory will work. Something completely new will be needed.

EM-Gravity coupling predicted by Heim Theory

[naasking]

Slashdot had an article on a "hyperdrive" paper which is based upon Heim Theory. Heim theory postulates EM-gravity coupling via the gravito-photon, and the experiment the Heim researchers recommended to produce gravito-photons, and thus produce gravitational effects, sounds similar to what this article is describing.

Re:Not quite.

[S3D]

The claims are disputed and have not been verified by similar experiments.

And your sources ?

Similar experiment that disputes results of this one. http://esamultimedia.esa.int/docs/gsp/Experimental _Detection.pdf

You should read the article you are citing. That is the exact experiment, that mentioned in TFA - Martin Tajmar et al experiment, which show anomalous gravimagnetic effect in the superconductive niobium ring which can not be explained by General Relativity, but can be explained by analogy between gravitons and photons.